Starting a Blog: Week 7

Hello my dear readers! For those who don’t know I decided that I wanted to chronicle my experience of starting a blog. The intent is so others can learn what it takes to start a blog, learn from my mistakes throughout the process, and to hopefully provide some humor and enjoyment to your day. If you want to learn how to start a blog, I created a tutorial on how to do so through Bluehost. (this post may contain affiliate links, but only those I use myself)

I’ve decided these weekly updates will be posted on weekends and will consist of 7 categories.

Blog posts that I published

Blog Improvements

Personal Accomplishments

Extra Income I earned

Extra Income I received

Goals I accomplished during the week

Goals for Next Week

I know this will be very similar to my monthly income reports, but I think having weekly and monthly goals are going to help me stay focused and break my bigger goals down into smaller ones. This should help me in accomplishing my monthly goals, but also allow me to celebrate additional small successes that may happen throughout each week.

So this is the end of week 7 of the life of my beloved blog. I am very excited to share my accomplishments from this week as I feel like I got a lot done this week!

Guys!!!! This was such a productive blog improvement week! I figured out so many things that should have been figured out weeks ago because of how easy they are. I’m just happy I figured it out now!

I spent some time browsing through some of the articles I’ve been pinning on my business Pinterestpage to try and gain some knowledge about how to improve my blog. I found quite a lot of info that I am very excited to start applying to what I do.

I installed the YOAST SEO plugin that should help me work on optimizing my blog being found through Google’s search engine. I’ve updated the SEO focus words on most of my posts so I’ll let you know how this goes once I’ve learned some more.

I reached out with another new affiliate partner! I received word back that I was approved for their affiliate program and am excited to start this new partnership!

I installed 5 other new plugins! Commentluv which allows people who comment on my posts to also share their posts, and WP Super Cache which is supposed to speed up my site, Wordfence which offers protection against potential hackers, and WordPress Editorial Calendar to help organize my scheduled posts, Related Posts by Zemanta to try and reduce my bounce rate.

I created an account withIZEA which is a company that offers sponsored posts. I’m not sure how this works yet, but I will update you as I learn.

I figured out how to make vertical pins on Pinterest using Picmonkey. I’m kind of smacking myself in the head, because it’s such an easy thing to do I can’t believe I made it out to be so hard.

I added a second ad to my website and cleaned up my sidebar widgets.

I updated my Recommendations page a bit.

I figured out how to change the color of my text!!!! (I am so dumb for not noticing this before lol)

Personal Accomplishments:

I started using Google Sheets! When my computer was hacked last week, they had to clean my hard drive so I was worrying about all the documents I have saved on my laptop. I started thinking about finding an online source I could use to start saving my documents and I think this may be perfect for now!

I accepted the internship offer with the wedding event company!

I lost 3 pounds this week! I am currently done over 5.4 pounds in the past month. Not my best but it’s a start!

I read 2 books this week!

We were able to celebrate my sister in law’s birthday on Sunday!

I won my first radio contest! I called in on a whim today and won 4 advanced screening tickets to see “Finding Dory” and a gift certificate to a local cupcake shop! Yummy!

I am very excited that I actually won a radio contest this week! It’s not extra income but I did win 4 free advanced screening tickets to see “Finding Dory” and a gift certificate to a local cupcake shop! This is the first radio contest I’ve ever won so it definitely makes me happy!

Affiliates: I am super excited to say that I earned $100 from one of my affiliate partners this week! (I included this on my May Income Report since I did receive this back in May). My blog is starting to make money and I am so happy for the possibilities this could provide me! I’m still in shock really, because while I may have been earning extra income throughout the life of my blog, I was still having to put work in to earn that money. This $100 is purely passive income and it feels great!

Extra Income I Received:

Mystery Shopping: $61.00

This Week’s Goals:

I decided that each week I will set 10 small goals for my blog. All of them should be helping me reach my bigger goals that I set each month.

Publish 3 posts-Pass! I published three posts!

Create a business schedule-Pass!I have created a business schedule and plan to update this as needed.

Network with 3 new bloggers-Pass! I networked with The Mostly Simple Life, Sarah Titus, and The Practical Saver.

Grow my business Pinterest account followers to 500-Pass!I currently have 542 followers!

Grow Twitter followers from 22 to 30- Pass! I am currently have 37 followers!

Earn $50 in extra income-Pass! I earned $140.81 this week! ($100 was in May though so it won’t be included on June’s income report, but it was included on my May income report)

Create Content schedule for the month of June and July-Pass! I have content planned and scheduled for both of these months!

Have 1 week worth of content prepared ahead of time- Fail.Guys…this is really hard to get ahead. But I did make all of this week’s posts early in the week so I kind of succeeded.

Guys this blogging business is so much fun!!!! I am so committed and I can’t wait to see how my blog continues to grow! I hope that you are feeling inspired to start your own blog or to follow your own dreams! If you’d like to start your own blog, I created a tutorial on how to do so using BlueHost. Check out my How to Start a Blog Page to start your own blog!

Share below what you have been doing this week to meet your blogging and personal goals!

I’m glad I inspired you to try and get some free cinema tickets – and so pleased for you that you won some – it’s amazing!
You’ve definitely given me the push to work on my blog more, seeing all the work you are putting into this one! I just changed my theme – I chose one, then realised it was your blog theme!! Typical haha!Francesca – From Pennies to Pounds recently posted…Beautiful Weddings on a Budget – DIY Ideas

Can we be friends? LOL. I am starting to think this is a bit crazy lol! You’re like my blonde twin from far far away 🙂
I’m so glad I am inspiring you! That is one of my goals for starting this blog! Good luck with improving your blog! It gets easier and tougher as time goes on 🙂
If you have any questions I will definitely do my best to help!